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Soft Baroque: The Latest Architecture and News

Concéntrico 2025 Opens in Logroño, Spain, With 24 Urban Interventions

The 11th edition of Concéntrico, the International Festival of Architecture and Design, is currently taking place in Logroño, Spain, from June 19 to 24, 2025. This year's edition broadens the scope of the festival with a multifaceted programme that includes not only temporary installations but also permanent projects, exhibitions, educational initiatives, and traveling events. Through 24 urban interventions, Concéntrico 2025 explores themes such as material reuse and circular design, food as a collective practice, the recovery of water-related spaces, the activation of urban voids, and interspecies connections in the urban context, while emphasizing the need to imagine new ways of inhabiting the city, placing care, sustainability, empathy, and active listening at the core of public architecture.

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Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten Discuss 2017 MPavilion, Reveal Temporary Installation 'Swings'

Two months after the opening of the 2017 MPavilion in Melbourne, its designers, OMA’s Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten, have returned to discuss the commission and design process, as well as their reactions to its use thus far.

“The opening was an opening with many formal obligations and many excellencies, and that was exciting,” said Koolhaas about the pavilions opening events. “But frankly more exciting was this morning, when the thing performed really wonderfully spontaneously in terms of raising a lot of issues and having from the very first second a really animated discussion about a whole range of issues. And that’s exactly we intended it go.”

In the Swedish City of Järfälla, Ten Radical "Superbenches" Are Unveiled as Community Incubators

Sweden is home to the world’s longest public bench. At 240 feet (around 72 meters) in length, the Långa Soffan (“long sofa”) was installed by the citizens of Oskarshamn in 1867 to overlook its rather unspectacular harbour, which opens toward the Baltic Sea. The function of this bench was not for passing time and taking in the coastal views, however; in times gone by it was rhythmically occupied by the wives of sailors awaiting their husband’s return from sea voyages. It allowed people to gather under a sense of common melancholy and collectively recall the smiles of their distant spouses before the ocean’s broad, blue canvas.